Madden 12 Surprise Onside Kick Revealed

The first-ever Madden 12 blog has just been released as we said it would, and while there were no major announcements apparent, there should be some level of excitement over the confirmation of a long-wanted addition; Madden 12 will feature surprise onside kicks.

Over the past few months, a lot of discussion has been waged over Twitter with Madden NFL 12 creative director Ian Cummings over the possible inclusion of surprise onside kicks into everyone’s favorite NFL video game. While the community has wanted such a feature for a while, the maneuver’s lack of presence in Madden became more noticeable with the release of Madden 11, shortly after the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl with the sneaky kick style. We’ve even had our own spats with Ian on the issue.

Now, however, all that debate can be put to rest as EA has confirmed its inclusion in Madden 12 in its first Madden 12 blog post.

Ian Cummings: “For those of you that may not have been following me closely on Twitter or anything, I fiercely debated against this feature for a while with many members of the community. This wasn’t because I didn’t want the feature (as of course it does happen on Sundays), but because I thought frankly that there were just more important tasks to do before we got to it. More importantly, I was worried about the exploitation of the feature online.

There were multiple members on the design team that kept bugging me about it because they also wanted the feature in, and we went back and forth for weeks on all the problems it might cause and the time it might cost to implement. After much debate, I just decided to take a look at the code myself and see if I could bite it off. I came in on a Saturday and hacked away, just trying to get some semblance of it working.”

Check out the video below for a first look at an early build of the surprise onside kick in action, and remember to leave us your thoughts on whether or not you think surprise onside kicks should be in the game.